There is no explicit declaration within the text as to what year the events of the novel take place, but Robinson has stated in interviews that she imagines Housekeeping taking place in the 1950s. Although he has dealt with many murders and other violent crimes, he is uncertain how to deal with Sylvie's apparent neglect of Ruth and Lucille.

Lucille, however, has chosen the simplicity of a normal life: a life full of doilies, dinners in fine restaurants, and perhaps a devotion to the art of housekeeping, the art of preserving the very spaces which entrap her. Like Fingerbone’s lake water, it has become a mirror in which generations of new readers can find themselves, as if for the first time. After the passing of their grandmother, the girls are constantly moving from one relative to another. Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House is a play ripe for a director’s dissection, with deep reflections of love and loss. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.Our catastrophes were far more common, the stuff of ordinary human drama: separation, relocation, divorce.

The man worked for the railroad and lived happily, but his life ended in a train derailment that took place on the bridge over the large glacial lake near Fingerbone.Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Eileen (Harris) and John J. The Zen of Housework” by Al Zolynas is a wonderful poem about finding the sacred in those most ordinary tasks. The grief that Ruth and Lucille’s experience pushes them to find different mechanisms of eliminating this disturbing sensation.

Though the mud in the road still stood inches high and gleamed like aspic on either side where tires passed through the ruts, I had liked the slippers well enough. In the story, Mary refuses to sign the petition that every other parent at the party signed saying "I don't think we have the right. I sat down on the grass, which was stiff with the cold, and I put my hands over my face, and I let my skin tighten, and let the chills run in ripples, like breezy water, between my shoulder blades and up my neck.However, the most extraordinary thing happens when Sylvie tells a story about a girl whose mother was taken by the court. Lucille and Ruth then go to school, but they do not have any notes that would explain their absence. Later, Sylvie tries to change the way she acts to prevent neighbors and the sheriff from taking away Ruth (he tries to persuade Ruth to stay with him and his wife). While Lorde’s analysis was correct at that time, today her vision “Define and conquer in our world must become define and empower” (p.

First published in 1980, Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are raised by a rotating cast of eccentric female family members after their mother drives a borrowed Ford off a cliff and into the lake that dominates the fictional town of Fingerbone. I worried particularly that such a fate would befall my mother when I was at my father’s house, or vice versa, as if my very presence was enough to keep them safe—as if, if I took my eyes off either one of them, they might disappear. She was singing and holding me, and it was sort of nice, but I could tell she was trying to smother me.So, rather than submit to yet another assault on their strange and transient association, Ruth and Sylvie burn down their house and escape together across the lake. Still, I remained convinced throughout my childhood that tragedies of such proportions were possible, if not probable, with the over-anxious imagination of one who fears abandonment.